Air application communicate with external hardware

Question

I wonder if my adobe air application can communicate with external hardware's API functions.

Answer 1

The short answer is no. AIR has no straightforward mechanism to interact with native code or operating system processes on the client's machine.

You can however make socket connections from the AIR client to a server process running on the client machine. Provided the server process can do the hardware integration you need, this will work, although it will complicate your installation routine somewhat since you need to install the AIR app + other native code.

One example of this is the Merapi project which connects AIR to a server-based Java application running on the client's machine, which can make exec() calls to launch native apps or use JNI to leverage native code.

http://www.merapiproject.net/